I just set up FeedBurner on
my site to start tracking readers. I
should have done this a long time ago (where long time = 7 days ago when I
started my blog). I’m pretty bummed with
the stats that are available on TypePad. By pretty bummed, I mean that the stats are
essentially useless. They don’t have any
information on click-through nor do they tell me either what aggregators are
hitting my site (although I can see a little of this in the referrers section,
which is pretty much the only part of their statistics that I find useful) and
they definitely don’t tell me how many underlying readers there are for my site
because they can’t surface information on how many customers each aggregator is
pulling for.
I’m going to write a future
post on the vanity of blogging, but suffice it to say for the moment that I
(and most bloggers that I know) check my stats pretty regularly. Its not that I’m specifically trying to vie
for a large audience (although it’s nice to know that the work I put into my
site is being seen by others), but I’m still interested in how many people are
reading what I’m putting out there.
So FeedBurner will help this
problem, but the way its works is to essentially alias my site through their
system. That’s fine, but anyone who has
already pulled my site into their aggregator won’t show up in these stats since
they aren’t pulling from the aliased site (they don’t exist as far as
FeedBurner is concerned). I could solve
this, I suppose, by hosting my own domain, using MovableType (or some other
software) instead of Typepad and redirecting all of my site traffic through
FeedBurner. Then again, the reason I’m
using Typepad in the first place is so I don’t have to do that.
I’m just venting. Brad told me the very first day I started blogging
to set up FeedBurner and, as I sometimes do, I basically pushed off his advice
until it became very clear that he was completely right and now I blame him for
not locking me in my office until I set it up a week ago. Seriously, though – setting up FeedBurner right
away would have allowed me to capture the information I want. By waiting a week, I basically lost
information on several hundred readers that I can’t recapture until I either
create my own site or until TypePad improves their stats.
So if anyone from SixApart is
out there listening – sharpen your statistics and make them into something that’s
actually useful for your users.
[end of rant]
Funny...I just switched my feed over to your FeedBurner feed, and I got every article over again (which is to be expected) EXCEPT THIS ONE!
Posted by: Brian Swanson | January 14, 2005 at 07:24 AM
How about a post asking those of us using aggregators giving the new (Feedburner) URL and asking us to switch our feeds over? I subscribed to you from Brad's original link, and I'd be happy to switch over to FB to help you out, just give me the link. :) It's a 10sec thing in NewsGator...
Posted by: Steve | January 18, 2005 at 03:56 PM